Encyclopædia Iranica

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Mahmoud and Teresa P. Omidsalar

a kind of story often defined as “an animal tale with a moral"; there is no exact Persian equivalent of the term, but the words afsāna, dāstān, hekāyat, qeṣṣa, and samar are used to refer to such stories.

Rudi Matthee

Multiple Authors

This article will deal with the faculties of Agriculture, Fine Arts, Law and Political Science, Letters and Humanities, and Medicine, which are among the oldest and most important secular institutions of higher education in Persia. Other faculties of the University of Tehran and main faculties of other major universities will be treated under individual UNIVERSITIES.

MOḤAMMAD-ḤASAN MAHDAWĪ ARDABĪLĪ

ll graduates received the equivalent of bachelors’s degrees in agricultural engineering and were employed by the Ministry of Agriculture (Wezārat-e kešāvarzī). From 1930 to 1939 a total of 187 people were graduated, an average of nineteen a year.

Ahmad Ashraf

one of the oldest institutions of modern higher education in Persia, founded in 1927 with the merger of the School of Political Science (established in 1899) and the School of Law (established in 1918). In 1934, when the University of Tehran was founded, the school formed one of six main faculties.

Aḥmad Tafażżolī

The Faculty of Letters and Humanities (Dāneškada-ye adabīyāt wa ʿolūm-e ensānī), originally named the Faculty of Letters, Philosophy, and Educational Sciences (Dāneškada-ye adabīyāt wa falsafa wa ʿolūm-e tarbīatī), was one of the six faculties of the University of Tehran when it was founded in February 1935.

YŪNOS KARĀMATĪ and EIr

(Dāneškada-ye pezeškī), the pioneering academic institution of modern medicine in Persia, one of the six main faculties of the new University of Tehran in 1934. It was the successor to the Dār al-fonūn Department of Medicine, established in 1851, which had become the School of Medicine (Madrasa-ye ṭebb) in 1919.

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Bo Utas

David Pingree

, the most prolific producer of astronomical tables in the Islamic world. FARID-AL-DIN ABU’L-HASAN ALI FAHHADis credited with a total of six tables, all of which are lost. There are three lists of these tables, given by Moḥammad b. Abū Bakr Fāresī in his al-Zīj al-momtaḥan al-moẓaffarī, by Šams Monajjem Wābeknavī in his al-Zīj al-moḥaqqaq, and by Ḥājī Ḵalīfa.

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EIr

pen-name of Moḥammad b. Manṣūr b. Saʿīd, entitled Mobārakšāh, author of two prose works in Persian written in India in the late 12th and early 13th century, a book on genealogy with no formal title and the famous Ādāb al-ḥarb wa’l-šajāʿa.

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Manṣūr Rastgār FASāʾī

prominent mojtahed of Shiraz (1840-1901). He led the prayer at Wakīl Mosque, where he regularly preached, and for years he wielded great influence in the religious, political, and social affairs of the city. He was an active opponent of the tobacco concession and instigated a riot against it.

Īraj Afšār

a book of presages and omens. The narrower and more common use of the term, equivalent to “bibliomancy,” is confined to texts used as material for divination by the reader directly or through a fortune-teller.

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Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mansour Shaki, Jeanette Wakin

Mehdi Amani, Nancy Hatch Dupree

a term for programs to regulate family size that came into use in the West in the 1930s. Although it originally encompassed efforts both to promote and to curtail fertility, explosive population growth in the developing countries since mid-century has narrowed its meaning to control of fertility.

Munibur Rahman

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C. Edmund Bosworth

a small district on the middle Syr Darya in Transoxania, at the confluence of that river with its right-bank tributary, the Arys, which flows down from Esfījāb, and also the name of a small town within it.

Dimitri Gutas

Deborah L. Black

Many of his writings take the form of commentaries on, or summaries of, the Aristotelian Organon, which, following the tradition of the Alexandrian commentators of late antiquity, included Porphyry’s Isagoge as well as Aristotle’sRhetoric and Poetics.

Thérèse-Anne Druart

His metaphysics scillates between two main projects: (1) a study of what is common to all beings, i.e., being as such and other universal notions such as oneness, and (2) a study of the ultimate causes, i.e., God and other immaterial beings.

Dimitri Gutas

Fārābī’s philosophical moorings and direct affiliation lie in the Greek neo-Aristotelian school of Ammonius in Alexandria, in the form in which it survived and was revived after the Islamic conquest among Syriac Christian clerics and intellectuals in the centers of Eastern Christianity in the Fertile Crescent.

Muhsin Mahdi

Daniel Balland

Farāh has retained practically the same name since the first millennium B.C.E. At the end of the first century B.C.E, the “very great city” of Phra in Aria was reckoned as a major stage on the overland route between the Levant and India.

Wolfram Kleiss

common place name throughout Persia, without any cultural or historical significance. The three best-known locales with this name are a city quarter of Tehran, the remains of a palace complext near Isfahan, and an Abbasid pleasure palace on the Caspian sea.

Reżā Reżāzāda Langarūdī

Hafez Farmayan

(1847-1913) Persian diplomat and author of a travelogue (safar-nāma) intended to show how a Shiʿite pilgrim could successfully undertake the journey to Mecca. In it one learns much about Arabia, the Ottoman empire, and the Sunnis in general.

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Moḥammad Dabīrsīāqī

Daniel Balland

river in southwestern Afghanistan, rising at about 3,300 meters above sea level in the Band-e Bayān, and, after a course of 712 km in a south-western direction, ending in the Hāmūn-e Ṣāberī (Sīstān) at an altitude of 475 m.

Mahnaz Moazami

Bahrām Farahvaši was born into a family with a long tradition of literary and scholarly pursuits. His father, ʿAli Moḥammad Farahvaši (1875-1968), was one of the pioneers of education reform in the early 20th century and established modern schools in Tehran, Zanjan, and Azerbaijan.

Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

Īraj Afšār

a category of books and manuals dealing with horses and horsemanship. Topics treated in this literary genre include horse-breeding, grazing, dressage, veterinary advice, horseracing and betting, and the art of divination based on the mien and movements of horses.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Jamsheed Akrami

Fardin’s 23-year film career blossomed late, after a short stint in the theater, and it suffered an early demise in 1981 when the Islamic Republic of Iran banned him from filmmaking in a wholesale purge of the major entertainers of the pre-revolution era.

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Gül A. Russell

(d. 1320), the most significant figure in optics after Ebn al-Hayṯam (Alhazen; 965-1040). The two names have been linked due to his critical revision of Ebn al-Hayṯam’s Ketāb al-manāẓer, which represents a watershed in the scientifi;c understanding of light and vision.

Aḥmad Mahdawī Dāmḡānī

a literary term used in Arabic literature to refer to poems in Arabic which contain some Persian words or even phrases in their original form, the most notable example being the Fāresīyāt of Abū Nowās.

William C. Chittick

Sayyāra Mahīnfar

Heshmat Moayyad

romantic figure in Persian legend and literature, best known from the poetry of Neẓāmī Ganjavī as a rival with the Sasanian king Ḵosrow II Parvēz (r. 591-628) for the love of the beautiful Armenian princess Šīrīn.

Rudi Matthee

Kambiz Eslami

(1818-1888), Qajar prince-governor and bibliophile. Holding highly conservative religious views on the administration of Persia, he viewed Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah's reformist vizier as an obliterator of the “foundation of the Muslim šarīʿa,” who was guilty of spreading the word “liberty” among the people.

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Nasserddin Parvin

Solomon Bayevsky

It took Ḥosayn Enjū twelve years to complete his dictionary (1005-17/1595-1608), which he named in honor of Jahāngīr. He produced a second edition in 1032/1622. The dictionary lists 9,830 words: 8,960 Persian; 630 Arabic; 140 Indian; and about a hundred entries of Turkic and Greek origin as well as words from various dialects.

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Solomon Bayevsky

a Persian dictionary compiled probably no later than 1315 by the founder of Persian lexicography in India, the poet and writer Faḵr-al-Dīn Mobārakšāh Qawwās Ḡaznavī, or Faḵr-e Qawwās, known also as Kamāngar.

Sheila S. Blair

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Mīnū Yūsofnežād

a county (šahrestān) located at the foot of the Zagros mountains in the western part of Isfahan province, bordered on the north by Ḵᵛānsār, on the northwest by Alīgūdarz (in Lorestān province), on the west by the county of Farīdūn-æahr, on the east by Najafābād, and on the south by Šahr-e Kord and Fārsān.

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Erwin F. Grötzbach

Bert G. Fragner

“decree, command, order, judgement.” The term often denotes a royal or governmental decree, that is a public and legislative document promulgated in the name of the ruler or another person holding elements of sovereignty.

Ahmad Ashraf

Cyrus Mir and EIr

(1858-1939), Qajar prince-governor, military commander, skillful politician, head of various ministries, and prime minister. He managed to sail successfully the stormy sea of Persian politics for several decades while the entire social and political landscape was undergoing dramatic change.

ʿABD-AL-ḤOSAYN NAVĀʾĪ

Shireen Mahdavi

(1817-1886), sixteenth son of ʿAbbās Mīrzā and grandson of Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah. His political and military career flourished in the reigns of his brother Moḥammad Shah (834-48) and his nephew Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (1848-96), under whom he held numerous governorships and other prominent posts.

ʿABD-AL-ḤOSAYN NAVĀʿĪ

Mohammad-Said Nouri Naini

in Persia. In the mid-1990s Persian agriculture accounted for over 25 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 25 percent of employment, and 33 percent of non-oil exports. It also met 75 percent of domestic food requirements and 90 percent of the needs of agricultural industries in the country.

Abolala Soudavar

The core myth that reveals the characteristics of farr, and its function, is the myth of Jamšid as reflected in the Avesta. Empowered by his farr, Jamšid rules the world, but loses it when he strays from the righteous path. After two preliminary encounters, his farr is taken by a falcon.

Farzaneh Milani

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Xavier de Planhol

comprised of the highland basins. East of the meridian of Bušehr and Isfahan, the Zagros mountain chains, which gradually decrease in altitude toward the southeast but still mostly remain above 2,000 and sometimes 3,000 m.

Josef Wiesehöfer

The history of early pre-Islamic Fārs is most closely interwoven with that of its eastern and western neighbors. Agrarian settlements had been established (by immigrants?) in the Muški phase in the Kor basin, a widely and well researched area, before 5,500 B.C.E.

A. K. S. Lambton

Although the Arabs did not take over the Sasanian system of quadrants, they kept the division of Fārs into five kūras, a division which continued until the 6th/12th century. Shiraz, a continuously inhabited site which may go back to Sasanian or even earlier times, became and has remained the provincial capital.

Ahmad Ashraf

The Qajar period (1794-1921) was marked in Fārs by developments such as the rule of dozens of prince-governors; Britain’s influence, with domination of the Persian Gulf; division of the Qašqāʾī and Ḵamsa tribal confederacies; continued local autonomy of tribal khans and influential landowners; and the increasing political role of the ʿolamāʾ.

Dietrich Huff

The founder of the Sasanian empire, Ardašīr I (224-40), shifted the seat of power to the newly founded Ardašīr Ḵorra (Fīrūzābād), a circular city with palaces that are still preserved. His successor, Šāpūr I, built Bīšāpūr as his capital. Nevertheless, Eṣṭaḵr remained the most important city of Fārs until Shiraz surpassed it after the Islamic conquest in the 7th century.

Habib Zanjani

The province of Fārs is the largest and the most populous province in the south of Persia. In the national census of 1996, it was composed of 16 counties (šahrestāns), comprising a total of 60 districts (baḵš), 48 towns (šahr), and 185 village clusters (dehestān).

Pierre Oberling

The largest part of the population of Fārs is of Iranian stock, but since the rise of Islam in the 7th century there has been substantial immigration of peoples of other ethnic origins into the province.

Gernot Windfuhr

Local variants of Persian are found in most cities and towns and their vicinities, and, rurally, mainly in the northeastern parts of the region, all of which tend to reflect a good deal of the vocabulary and idiomatic features of the earlier non-Persian dialects.

Abbas Alizadeh

Six archeological sites—Tall-e Muški, Tall-e Jari A and B, Tall-e Gap, and Tall-e Bākun A and B—in the Persepolis plain of the Marvdašt area are the primary sources for the study of the prehistoric cultural development in Fārs.

Nassereddin Parvin

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Heribert Busse; Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi

a history and geography of the province of Fārs, with maps and illustrations, by Mīrzā Ḥasan Fasāʾī (1821-1898). Part two includes topics such as the climate of Fārs, its flora and fauna, agricultural products, the position of Fārs according to longitude and latitude, the problem of cartographic projection.

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Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

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Official, soldier and poet of the Ghaznavid empire, flourished in the second half of the 5th/11th century during the reigns of the sultans Ebrāhīm b. Masʿūd I and Masʿūd III b. Ebrāhīm. See ABŪ NAṢR FĀRSĪ.

Pierre Oberling

Carl W. Ernst

of Khandesh, lit. "land of the khans" in present-day Madhya Pradesh (1370-1601). The prosperity of Khandesh depended upon trade and the production of fine textiles. Patronage of Češtī Sufism also was an important element of Fārūqī state policy.

Habib Borjian

Daniel Balland

by the 10th century, one of the towns of the Farighunid princes of Gūzgān, vassals of the Samanids. The medieval name was revived when the high governorate (ḥokūmat-e ʿalā) of Maymana was elevated to the rank of province (welāyat). Its cities, besides Maymana, are Andḵūy and Dawlatābād.

Nassereddin Parvin

Chahryar Adle

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Ahmad Karimi Hakkak

Throughout this period, Farzād wrote poetry, mostly within the classical tradition. In 1942 he published a selection of his poems in a volume entitled Waqtī ke šāʿer būdam (When I was a poet). He had also begun work on a new edition of Ḥāfeẓ’s Dīvān, a task which became a life-long labor.

EIr

Multiple Authors

MĪNŪ YŪSOFNEŽĀD and JUDITH LERNER

The sub-province (šahrestān) of Fasā, with an area of ca. 3,820 km2, is bounded to the north by the šahrestāns of Eṣṭahbān/Estahbān and Shiraz, to the east by Eṣṭahbān and Dārāb, to the south by Dārāb and Jahrom, and to the west by Jahrom and Shiraz.

JOHN F. HANSMAN

a tell or artificial mound, lying within a still broader archeological zone, built up by successive layers of human occupation from prehistoric to medieval times; it is located 130 km south of Shiraz and 3 km southeast of Fasā.

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Ali Ferdowsi

Fasih left Iran in 1956, and eventually ended up in Montana State College in Bozeman, Montana. Beginning with his junior year at the college, he transferred to the University of Montana in Missoula where he earned a BS in Chemistry and a BA in English.

ḎABĪḤ-ĀLLĀH ṢAFĀ

Anatol Ivanov

Denise Soufi

in Persia. Both individually and communally, fasting is typically a religious exercise—employed by devotees as means of supplication to the will of God, preparation for rites of devotion, worship of divinity, purification of the body so that spiritual issues can be better comprehended, penitence for transgressions against religious codes, and mourning for deceased persons. OVERVIEW of entry: i. Among Zoroastrians, Manicheans, and Bahais. ii. In Sunni and Shiʿite Islam.

Based on a longer article by ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Zarrīnkūb

in the Islamic period. The concept of fatalism as commonly used in Islamic philosophy and Persian literature denotes the belief in the pre-ordained Decree of God (qażā wa qadar), according to which whatever happens to human beings or in the whole universe has been pre-determined by the will and knowledge of the Almighty, and that no changes or transformations in it can be made through the agency of the human will.

S. H. Qasemi

abridged Persian translation by Qāżī Najm-al-Dīn Khan Kākorī of a six-volume Arabic work on Hanafite law (ed. Būlāq, 1859) considered the authoritative compendium of religious law, policy, and practice in India.

Jean Calmard

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Fakhreddin Azimi

Fāṭemī protested against the government rigging of the elections for the Sixteenth Majles with MosÂaddeq, helped to mobilize support, and in October 1949 was one of a delegation selected to accompany MosÂaddeq in a sit-in (bast) at the royal palace protesting the conduct of the elections.

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ʿABD-AL-ḤOSAYN NAVĀʾĪ

Abbas Amanat

(1769-1834), second ruler of the Qajar dynasty. He transformed a largely Turkic tribal khanship into a centralized and stable monarchy on the old imperial model which brought to the Guarded Domains of Persia (mamālek-e maḥrūsa-ye Īrān) a period of relative calm and prosperity, secured a state-religious symbiosis, and fostered a period of cultural and artistic revival.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Farhad Daftary

relations with Persia. A major Ismaʿili Shiʿite dynasty, the Fatimids founded their own caliphate, in rivalry with the ʿAbbasids, and ruled over different parts of the Islamic world, from North Africa and Sicily to Palestine and Syria.

Steven Anderson

the assemblage of animal species, generally excluding domestic animals, living within a defined geographical area or ecological zone. i. Fauna of Persia. ii. Fauna of Afghanistan. iii. Fauna of Central Asia.

O. L. Kryzhanovskiĭ

the assemblage of animal species, generally excluding domestic animals, living within a defined geographical area or ecological zone. OVERVIEW of the entry: i. Fauna of Persia. ii. Fauna of Afghanistan. iii. Fauna of Central Asia.

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Jalāl Matīnī

Fayyāż remained an indefatigable scholar all his life. Going beyond his traditional background, he studied a number of western languages, including Russian, German, English, ancient Greek, and Latin. He was a meticulous scholar, combining his profound knowledge of traditional Islamic sciences and Persian literature with modern methodology in scholarship and literary criticism.

Moojan Momen

Arezou Azad

13th-century local history from Balḵ in eastern Khorasan, with a collection of biographies of Balḵ’s early Islamic scholars and mystics. It differs from many other local histories of medieval Islamic cities in that it comprises a mix of historical, topographical, and prosopographical information, covering six centuries from the advent of Islam to the late 12th century.

Moojan Momen

Hūšang Etteḥād

From the beginning of 1934, Mohammad-Hosayn taught Arabic language and literature and Islamic philosophy at the University of Tehran, becoming a full professor two years later. He retired from teaching in 1958. He was known for his memory, his sense of humor, and his ability to form friendships with colleagues from different disciplines.

Tahsın Yazici

or Ketāb al-fehrest; a celebrated catalogue of books in Arabic, drafted in 987 by Ebn al-Nadīm. Some scholars regard him as a Persian, but this is not certain. However, his choice of a rather rare Persian word for the title of a handbook on Arabic literature is noteworthy.

Hūšang Aʿlam

Daniel Balland and Jean-Pierre Digard

(namad), material produced by process of felting, the entanglement of animal fiber in all directions, done to form a soft and homogeneous mass. The technique was originally devised in nomadic communities of Central Asia (Pazyryk, 5th to 3rd centuries BCE).

EIr, Janet Afary

Persia of the 20th century saw a number of popular, often small and short-lived, women’s rights activities which had been mobilized by liberal and left wing authors, journalists, and political organizations in the 1900s-1920s and again in the 1940s-50s.

Hamideh Sedghi

in the Pahlavi Period. The fundamental political, socio-cultural, and economic changes which Persia underwent in the Pahlavi era (1921-78) had drastic repercussions on the women’s rights movement and the condition of women.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini

After the Revolution of 1978-79, “feminism,” because of its associations with the West and its appropriation by the previous regime, soon became viewed by the ruling clerics as synonymous with decadence.

Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

Hajw-nāma is the title of a verse lampoon of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ḡazna attributed to Ferdowsī. According to Neẓāmī ʿArūżī, after Ferdowsī presented his Šāh-nāma, the sultan used the pretext of the poet’s alleged Muʿtazilite and Shiʿite orientation to give him only twenty thousand dirhams as the reward for the epic.

A. Shahpur Shahbazi

The rise of nationalism in Persia early this century motivated scholars and dignitaries to urge the government to build a suitable mausoleum for the poet who had done so much to preserve Iranian identity and history. Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār wrote articles urging Reżā Khan to prove his asserted nationalism by building a mausoleum.

A. Shahpur Shahbazi

Already in 1922 Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the most influential poet of the time and a politician-journalist, urged Reżā Khan (later Reżā Shah), who had recently seized power, to prove his asserted nationalism by celebrating Ferdowsī and building a worthy mausoleum for the “resurrector of Iranian national identity and people.”

EIr

Ever since the appearance of the Šāh-nāma, Ferdowsī has been held in high esteem, and many poets have referred to him and his work, the best known being Saʿdī’s tribute in the Būstān to “Ferdowsī-ye pāk-zād,” quoting a line from him even though the verse itself has not been found in the Šāh-nāma .

Aḥmad Tafażżolī

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Gavin R. G. Hambly

popular title of Golšan-e ebrāhīmī, a general history of Muslim India by Moḥammad-Qāsem Hendušāh Astarābādī (b. Astarābād ca. 1570), the celebrated historian of the Deccan known by the pen name (taḵalloṣ) of Ferešta.

Jacqueline Calmard-Compas

Gavin R. G. Hambly

Mehdi Amani

in Persia. Up to 1986 the Persian birthrate was high (as high as 48-49 per 1,000), compared to the world rate but had dropped from 1966, as a result of official policies on family planning. In 1994 the Persian birthrate equaled the average for Asia and Central America, 26 to 30 per 1,000 population, reflecting a continued very high fertility rate.

Multiple Authors

Mary Boyce

fall into two broad categories. There are the seven feasts of obligation, that is, No Rōz (Nowrūz) and the six gāhānbārs (gāhāmbār; q.v.), which formed the framework of the religious year, and which it was a sin not to keep; and others, which it was a merit, not a duty, to observe.

Anne H. Betteridge and EIr, Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Keith Hitchins

Moojan Momen, Amnon Netzer, A. Arkun

WILLIAM PIROYAN and EDEN NABY

The adoption of Christianity by the Assyrians in the latter part of the 1st century led to the harmonization of older community celebrations and commemorations with Christian doctrine as well as the introduction of specifically Christian religious holidays.

NANCY HATCH DUPREE

Festive ceremonies in Afghanistan mark special religious days and major events in individual life cycles. Few are formally organized, being celebrated primarily to keep family bonds strong and community ties congenial.

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Jean Calmard

(1842-1926), Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s personal physician (1889-1892), author of Trois ans à la cour de Perse, with engravings from photographs in the collections of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah and his retinue, Feuvrier’s own drawings, and Persian contemporary paintings. The book is a major source of information, notably on the Tobacco Concession and its aftermath.

J. T. P. de Bruijn

OVERVIEW of the entry: i. TRADITIONAL FORMS. This article deals with all kinds of stories written for specifically literary purposes up to the time when narrative prose in the modern style, derived from the West, was introduced in Persia.

SĪMĪN BEHBAHĀNĪ and EIr

ii(a). HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF MODERN FICTION. The long reign of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (1848-96) and the Constitutional Revolution a decade after his death witnessed the gradual emergence of modern fiction in Persia.

Shahwali Ahmadi

ii(g). IN AFGHANISTAN. The introduction of modern fiction in Afghanistan was concomitant with the institution of new educational and literary organizations, namely the Ḥabībīya School and Anjoman-e adabī, and the publication of the bi-weekly Serāj al-aḵbār-e afḡānīya, edited by Maḥmūd Ṭarzī, in the early twentieth century.

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Mark Garrison

a structure used to to hold fire for urposes of veneration, probably contained within a metal or clay bowl. The term should probably be restricted to those structures which have a clear Zoroastrian religious context.

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Klaus Schippmann

Fariborz Majīdī and Hūšang Etteḥād

one of Tehran’s oldest high schools, founded by Parsi philanthropist Bahramji Bikaji as a memorial to his son Fīrūz, who was lost at sea in the Mediterranean in 1915. Bikaji’s initial plan was to build an elementary school in

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Maziar Behrooz

Firuz was born into the royal Qajar family. Her father was ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Mirzā Farmānfarmā, the second son of Firuz Mirzā Noṣrat-al-Dawla Farmānfarmā, the sixteenth son of ʿAbbās Mirzā, son and the crown prince of Fatḥ-ʿAli Shah, the second Qajar king.

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Dietrich Huff

The plain of Fīrūzābād has been inhabited since prehistoric times, with a major Chalcolithic site, Tall-e Rīgī, in the south. Surrounded by precipitous mountains with few and easily defensible access roads, it was chosen by Ardašīr-e Bābakān as the key stronghold in his revolt against the last Parthian King.

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Bernard Hourcade

name of two towns: (1) a fortified city in the medieval Islamic province of Ḡūr in Central Afghanistan, which was the capital of the senior branch of the Ghurid sultans (see GHURIDS) for some sixty years in the later 6th/12th and 7th/13th centuries; (2) fortress and surrounding settlement in the Damāvand region of the Alborz mountains in northern Persia.

Multiple Authors

Mohammad A. Dandamayev, Rika Gyselen

There probably was no clear distinction between state and royal incomes in the Achaemenid empire. All state receipts were considered royal property, as was the income from the king’s estates. Beginning from ca. 519 B.C.E., when Darius I established a new tax system, the peoples subject to the Persians paid 7,740 Babylonian talents of silver (i.e., 232,200 kg) a year.

JÜRGEN PAUL

iii. ISLAMIC PERIOD Such a system can be studied in at least three aspects: First, its relationship to the ruler or the government; second, its relationship to those groups in the population who serve as sources of revenue (“taxpayers”);

MASSOUD KARSHENAS

Adnan Mazarei

The receipt of large revenues from oil exports and their expenditure for developing various sectors of the economy, improving infrastructure, and providing social services have made the government’s fiscal policies a major determinant of the overall economic incentives, structure and level of economic activity.

David Yeroushalmi

Multiple Authors

in Persia. With about 1,800 km of coastline along the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, and about 990 km on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, plus some inland fresh waters, Persia has a great variety of aquatic fauna: mollusks, crustaceans, chelonians, mammals (dolphins, whales, seals), and particularly, fishes. Thus the country has rich aquatic resources and considerable potential for fishing and aquaculture.

Brian W. Coad

With about 1,800 km of coastline along the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, and about 990 km on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, plus some inland fresh waters, Persia has a great variety of aquatic fauna: mollusks, crustaceans, chelonians, mammals, and especially fishes.

Hušang Aʿlam

Except for occasional short reports by foreign researchers on some individual fish species from the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf, there was no comprehensive scientific study of the ichthyofauna of the region until the Danish H. Blegvad and B. Løppenthin’s systematic survey.

Hušang Aʿlam

NAJMIEH BATMANGLIJ

Although fish is the main source of animal protein along the northern and southern coasts of Persia, it is not much eaten in the rest of the country but in a smoked form as a delicacy traditionally served with rice and fresh herbs on the first day of the new year at the end of the zodiacal month of Pisces.

Houshang Alam

There was no real fishing organization in Persia until the second half of the 19th century when Russian subjects, encouraged and backed by the Tsarist Russia’s expansionist policy, becameinncreasingly involved in coastal and fluvial fishing activities in the Caspian provinces of Persia.

Dick Davis

(1809-1883), British translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (by far the most famous translation ever made from Persian verse into English), as well as Jāmī’s Salāmān o Absāl and ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭeq al-ṭayr.

Multiple Authors

A. Shapur Shahbazi

The earliest-known representation of lion and sun as a banner device is a miniature painting illustrating a copy, dated 1423, of the Šāh-nāma of Šams-al-Dīn Kāšānī—an epic composition on the Mongol conquest. A similar early depiction is on a large, double-paged miniature dated ca. 1460.

Habib Borjian

Nāder Shah’s (1929-33) policy of moderate reforms was reflected in the flag he reportedly used when he seized power—the tricolor flag introduced by Amān-Allāh; it was soon modified as a bound sheaf of wheat circling a stylized mosque, which recalls the mausoleum of Aḥmad Shah Dorrānī.

Habib Borjian

On 28 April 1929, the constitution of the Tajik ASSR adopted a state arms and flag. The arms consisted of a hammer (bālḡa) and local sickle (dās) symbol against a star, which depicts a blue sky brightened by golden rays of sun rising above snowy mountains. The star is encircled on each side by wreaths of wheat and cotton.

Jean Calmard

Eugène Flandin was the son of Jean-Baptiste Flandin, an intendant in Napoléon’s armies. Little is known about his mother Marie-Agnès Durand. Eugène’s early years were linked with his father’s tumultuous career. He was only two years old when his family returned from Naples, where his father had been assigned since 1807, serving with Murat.

Multiple Authors

Karl Hummel

The indigenous knowledge of plants in Persia had a long standing tradition before the country’s flora was explored by Europeans, who were eventually joined in modern scientific botany by Persian botanists.

Wolfgang Frey, Harald Kürschner, Wilfried Probst

With approximately six thousand recorded species of ferns and flowering plants, Persia harbors one of the richest floras of the Near Eastern countries, ranging from subtropical forests to dry-adapted woodlands, dwarf shrubs and thorn cushion formations, and semidesert shrublands.

Cross-Reference

Wolfgang Frey

a monumental work on the plants of Persia. Edited by Karl Heinz Rechinger of Vienna since 1963, Flora Iranica now consists of some 172 fascicles and is nearly complete. Only two spermatophyte families, the Cyperaceae and the Rubiaceae, are as yet lacking

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Josef Elfenbein

Floyer became the first station chief at Jāsk in 1870, although he was only seventeen, and served until 1877. Goldsmid encouraged his station and substation staff to explore their surroundings, and Floyer was one of those who responded, taking a long leave of absence in 1876-77.

Gerd Gropp

Jens Kröger

(1874-1935) pioneer of Islamic paleographical studies. Although Flury was primarily interested in problems of the development of Kufic script, much of his specific research was focused on monuments in Persia.

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Philip G. Kreyenbroek

in Iranian languages. The term ‘folk poetry’ can be properly used for texts which have some characteristics marking them as poetry and belong to the tradition of the common people, as against the dominant ‘polite’ literary cult

Multiple Authors

aims to provide a summary of folklore studies made in or about the Iranian world. It encompasses a wide field of varying notions, ranging from popular beliefs and customs to myths, legends and other genres of oral literature.

Margaret A. Mills and Abdul Ali Ahrary

Folklore may be defined as roughly comprising the oral-traditional component of culture, complementary or competitive with an official, canonical “written” culture, but this definition presents certain problems.

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B. A. Litvinskiĭ

(FONDUKISTAN), early medieval settlement and Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan, in the province of Parvān (Parwan). The site is usually dated to the 7th century CE on the evidence of artistic style and numismatic finds, the oldest of which is from 689 C.E. However, the shape and the decorations of the stupa suggest that the complex can be even earlier.

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Houchang Chehabi

Sayyed Mohammad Dabirsiaghi

Early dictionaries describe foqqāʿ as a kind of barley wine or beer but the semantic range later expanded to include juices from dried raisins, fruits, honey, and other ingredients. Because the liquid was not allowed to ferment, a distinction was often drawn between foqqāʿ as non-alcoholic and nabīd,ò which was fermented and could therefore be intoxicating.

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Meir M. Bar-Asher

Shiʿite(most probably Imami) Koran commentator and Hadith scholar. The dates of his birth and death are unknown, but the time he flourished can be estimated by the dates of the scholars whom he quoted or who transmitted Hadith on his authority.

Multiple Authors

Eckart Ehlers

Less than 2 percent of Persia is covered by forests, while another 8 to 9 percent may be regarded as depleted former forest areas. Altogether, 150-160,000 km² are, or have been, densely forested areas.

Multiple Authors

Abolala Soudavar, Oscar White Muscarella

of art objects and manuscripts. Early in the Islamic era, Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī described in his al-Aṯār al-bāqīa how emergent Islamic rulers of Persia had forged their lineage and invented connections with previous dynasties in order to affirm their own legitimacy.

Sheila S. Blair, Francis Richard

Medieval Arabic and Persian literature contain numerous anecdotes about the forging of manuscripts, but it was only in the late 19th century that forging Persian works of Islamic art became a widespread phenomenon.

Manouchehr Kasheff

(1854-1920), pen name of the poet, scholar, and artist Mīrzā Moḥammad-Naṣīr Ḥosaynī Šīrāzī. In 1908 he was appointed the first director of the Shiraz branch of the Department of Education. In Fārs he arranged for the establishment of modern schools and for the education of tribal children.

Heshmat Moayyad

Bagher Agheli

Fakhreddin Azimi, Iraj Afshar

(1877-1942), statesman, scholar, and man of letters. Forūḡī’s personal integrity and honesty have rarely been disputed, even by his critics. Others have blamed him for helping to bring about Reżā Shah’s regime and continuing to serve it despite its blatant misdeeds.

Manouchehr Kasheff

Mina Marefat and EIr, Richard N. Frye

(1907-1983), pioneer of modern architecture in Persia, an influential professor of architecture at the University of Tehran, and a noted collector of Persian art. He was imprisoned in 1979 after the revolution, and his art collection was placed in the Archaeological Museum, Tehran.

IRAJ AYMAN

In Ashkhabad, Forutan had the opportunity to study under the Bahai scholar, Mirzā Mahdi Golpāygāni, and at his bidding gave lectures at Bahai meetings and wrote articles for the Bahai magazines Fekr-e-javān and Ḵoršid-e ḵāvar. When he was in secondary school, Forutan served as a member of the Bahai Youth Committee in Ashkhabad.

Jean During

Abd-al-Hosayn Zarrinkub

(1903-1970) Persian literary scholar and critic, professor at the University of Tehran, one of the pioneers of literary studies in modern Persia. A significant part of Forūzānfar’s scholarship was devoted to Rūmī and his associates; other works cover Islamic mysticism and philosophy.

Steven C. Anderson

Mahmoud and Teresa Omidsalar

In pre-Islamic Iran, the fox was considered as one of the ten varieties of dog, created against a demon called xabag dēw. In Islam, although consuming fox flesh is forbidden by most schools of law, medicinal use of various parts of the fox’s body is allowed for treatment of a variety of conditions.

Muhammad A. Dandamayev

William W. Malandra

an Avestan-Pahlavi glossary so named after its first entry, Av. oīm glossed by Pahl. ēwag, though the work is introduced with the lengthy title: “On the understanding of the speech and words of the Avesta, namely, what and how its zand is.”

D. N. MacKenzie

lit. “a Pahlavi dictionary,” is rather a description than the title of an anonymous glossary of some five hundred mostly Aramaic heterograms (ideograms), in the form used by Zoroastrians in writing Middle Persian (Book Pahlavi), each explained by a “phonetic” writing of the corresponding Persian word.

Marie-Louise Chaumont

Multiple Authors

Jean Calmard

Compared to the long-standing history of Persian civilization, France emerged as a powerful entity endowed with its own distinctive culture only in the 13th century C.E., i.e. the great century of Christianity.

Marie-Louise Chaumont

Massoud Farnoud

The motives for Franco-Persian administrative and military contacts between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, their implementation and their impact on Persia will be examined here.

Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi

Persians saw the French Revolution as sedition (fetna), corruption (fesād), a general disturbance by the populace (balwā-ye ʿāmm), insurrection (šūreš), the great revolution (enqelāb-e ʿaẓīm), and the great revolution (enqelāb-e kabīr).

Anne-Marie Touzard

While the Italian cities and Spain entered into diplomatic relations with Persia at an early date, this was not true of France, despite an abortive attempt—the dispatch in 1626 of Louis Deshayes de Courmenin to the court of Shah ʿAbbās I. The early 17th century also witnessed the great missionary upsurge in France.

Nader Nasiri-Moghaddam

On the reign of Nāder Shah (1736-1747), accounts by missionaries, notably those by the Jesuit Père Louis Bazin, chief physician to Nāder Shah from 1746 until the latter’s assassination, form useful complements to the Persian sources.

J. Duchesne-Guillemin

Christophe Balay

The new trends in Persian literature in the beginning of the 20th century are closely related to social and political changes which began in Persia under Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah (1848-96), and brought about the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11.

Yves Porter

French collections, both public and private, contain hundreds of Persian works of art. Some of these reached France during the Middle Ages, notably after the Crusades, but most of the great collections containing Persian art were created during the second half of the 19th century.

Vincent Hachard and Bernard Hourcade

The genuine beginning of Persian studies in France began with the foundation in Istanbul and Smyrna (Izmir) of a “School of languages for the young” in 1669 to train translators of Ottoman Turkish for French consulates. After merger with the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1763, the teaching of Persian was introduced.

Philippe Gignoux

Bernard Hourcade

The history of French scholarship on modern Persia particularly in the field of social sciences was shaped by major external factors including the overall political relationship between the two countries and the radical changes which took place in the French university system and the organization of its scholarly missions to Persia in the latter half of this century.

R. Boucharlat

The Institut français de recherche en Iran (IFRI) was established in its present form and under the above name in l983, although in Persia it is usually referred to as Anjoman-e īrān-šenāsī-e farānsa dar Īrān.

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Djavad Hadidi

French schools in Persia had more varied roots than other foreign schools, originating from three distinct sources: Catholic, Jewish, and secular. Catholic schools were established by Lazarist missionaries, Jewish schools by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (q.v.), and lay schools by Alliance Française.

Guitty Deyhime

The gradual entry of a large number of loan words into Persian from European languages and most notably from French began in the 19th century and continued through the 20th century as part of the process of modernization of culture and society in Persia.

VidaNassehi-Behnam

The emergence of a Persian community in France can perhaps be traced back to 1272/1855-6, when Farrok Khan Ḡaffārī, Amīn-al-Molk, later Amīn-al-Dawla was sent to Paris as the shah’s envoy (īlcī-e kabīr).

Datus C. Smith, Jr.

(Moʾassasa-ye entešārāt-e Ferānklīn), an American non-profit corporation seeking to aid development of indigenous book publishing in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The program in Persia (1954-1979, the first after Egypt) was the largest of the seventeen around the world.

Mary Boyce

Ahmad Tafazzoli

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak

in Persian poetry. The term šeʿr-e āzād, Persian for the French vers libre and English free verse, entered Persia in the 1940s and immediately began to be used in a variety of senses and applied to diverse subspecies of the emerging canon of šeʿr-e now (new poetry), especially to highlight those features in which this body of poetry was felt to differ from classical Persian poetry and the contemporary practice modeled after it.

Multiple Authors

Multiple Authors

This famous fraternal order, bound by rituals and secret oaths, was introduced to Persia and adopted by Persian notables in the 19th century. It developed in the early 20th century and burgeoned in the period from 1950-78. Its practice still continues among some middle- and upper-class Persians in exile at the turn of the 21st century. The topic will be treated in five entries.

Hasan Azinfar, M.-T. Eskandari, and Edward Joseph

The principal officers of the Lodge are the Worshipful Master and the Senior and Junior Wardens. The Worshipful Master is the head and chief of the Lodge, the source of light, of knowledge, and instruction. Dressed formally on a high pedestal, the Worshipful Master presides over the formal Masonic sessions.

Hamid Algar

Persians made their first acquaintance with Freemasonry outside Persia, in India, and more importantly in Europe, and it was not until the first decade of the 20th century that a lodge regularly affiliated to one of the recognized European obediences appeared in the country.

EIr

Freemasonry in the Pahlavi era underwent three distinct phases: (1) dormancy, from 1925-1950 under Reżā Shah and for the decade following his abdication in 1941; (2) revival, and the creation of the Lodge Pahlavi; (3) burgeoning, in the period of 1955-78, when dozens of regular lodges were chartered.

EIr

From the onset of the 1978-79 revolutionary upheavals the Persian Freemasons became vulnerable to the anti-Masonic sentiments and threats of the main participants in the revolutionary coalition, including Islamic Fundamentalists, Leftist organizations, and Liberal-Nationalist forces.

Hasan Azinfar, M.-T. Eskandari, and Edward Joseph

Solomon Bayevsky

(1879-1968), founder and the head of the Soviet school of the comparative-historical method in Iranian linguistics. For sixty years, Freĭman worked in various areas of Iranian languages. His work on Sogdian, Chorasmian, and Ossetic is especially important.

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Hūšang Aʿlam

(mīva). Jean Chardin (1643-1713) reported (p. 24) that “in Persia there were all the same kinds of fruit as in Europe and many others, all incomparatively delicious.” He noted the great variety of melons, cucumbers, grapes, dates, apricots, pomegranates, apples, pears, oranges, quinces, prunes, figs, pistachios, almonds, walnuts, filberts, and olives.

Michael J. Franklin

(b. ca. 1650; d. 1733), British travel-writer and doctor. His writings display a lively curiosity, which, sharpened by his scientific training, produces accurate observations in geology, meteorology, and all aspects of natural history.

Mahmoud Omidsalar

Marcel Bazin

town and district in western Gīlān, 21 km west-southwest of Rašt, on the left bank of Gāzrūdbār river. An important town in medieval times, Fūman is again a commercial and administrative center, with a very active Tuesday market and a large tea-processing factory.